Carnival of Souls

With Halloween coming up tomorrow, I decided I'd watch one of the horror movies I recorded earlier this month. The movie I picked is Carnival of Souls.

Candace Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, a church organist in Kansas who one days goes out riding with a couple of friends. They get challenged to a drag race by a couple of guys. During the race, they reach a bridge, and in trying to cross the bridge, the women's car crashes off the bridge into the river below! With the river being as deep as it is and having a strong current, the police figure they'll never find the car in the mud. So everybody in the car must have died tragically.

But then, on a sandbar in the river, we see a wet and muddy Mary struggling onto the island. She's alive! But for fairly obvious reasons, she doesn't want to stay in a town that has traumatic memories. Thankfully, she's got a job waiting for her in Utah, so she decides to head there immediately.

On the long drive, however, something strange happens. She looks out the side window, and sees instead of a reflection, a pale face of what looks like a male zombie of some sort (Herk Harvey, who also directed). Unsurprisingly, this unnerves Mary. The fact that the town she's going to be working in also has an old abandoned amusement park just outside of town is also unnerving.

When she gets to the rooming house where she's going to rent a room, the only other roomer is the mildly seedy John Linden, who seems a bit dishonest but worse, is very forward in trying to pursue Mary. She's OK with being friendly, but not much more. And then she sees that zombie again, this time coming from inside the house!

And then there are times where things grow hazy for Mary, and then it seems as if nobody can see or hear her, and she can't hear them. She talks to people, and they just treat her as if there's nobody there. What's going on? Mary thinks perhaps she can find out something if she goes to that abandoned amusement park, which was also used as an outdoor summertime dance pavilion. And on her visits there, she sees... a whole group of those zombies dancing!

You might be able to guess where this is all heading, although I won't reveal it. In some ways, there's not much to guess. That's because Carnival of Souls is a very low-budget movie made by independent filmmaker Harvey who was able to parlay locations around his home town of Lawrence KS, and that abandoned amusement park in Utah into a feature-length movie, one of the few he made, having worked mostly in shorts like Shake Hands With Danger that shows up on TCM Underground from time to time. Harvey also used a cast mostly of non-professionals, which is why I only mentioned a couple of names.

But even taking all that into consideration, Carnival of Souls is a really effective little movie. The score is entirely organ music, although a lot of it sounds more like an organ tune for the old soap operas than a more stately church pipe organ to me; in any case it works. The clearly imperfect acting is disconcerting, and the amusement park location really works well.

There are several DVD releases of Carnival of Souls, last time I checked. I'm not certain if any of them have noticeably better prints than others.